Video: IBM Platform LSF in the Cloud at SC15

In this video from SC15, Jeff Karmiol and Gabor Samu from IBM describe how IBM LSF in the Cloud makes sure that user data gets to the right place at the right time.

“IBM High Performance Services provides a ready-to-run cluster in the cloud – complete with IBM Platform LSF workload management software, SoftLayer infrastructure and the support of a dedicated cloud operations team. With IBM High Performance Services organizations can implement a hybrid cloud environment, rapidly extending local infrastructure to physical, non-shared infrastructure in the SoftLayer cloud to quickly accommodate peaks in demand without being concerned about security or performance.”

Transcript:

insideHPC: I heard something about LSF in the Cloud, what’s that about?

Jeff Karmiol: Yeah. We’re now providing LSF in the Cloud as a service to our customers because their workloads are getting larger over time, they’re converging– HPC is not converging with Analytics and even tough they provision for their average load, they can never provision for the spikes or for new projects. So we’re helping our clients out by providing the services in the Cloud, where they can get LSF or Platform Symphony, or Spectrum Scale.

And we’re building LSF in the Cloud for them on IBM SoftLayer, and we’re building them– were using our Cloud operations team, these guys have over 20 years of experience building HPC environments. So were building real high-performance environment for them. I mean they’re running on big bare metal machines, high-performance running Nvidia, GPU’s, SSD’s, InfiniBand. So these are real HPC class machines.

And we’re building them and delivering and testing them, and supporting them. We’re supporting them for our clients so they don’t have to worry about more infrastructure, they can concentrate on their own business. They’re using two ways, one is they’re creating a HyperCloud where they’re connecting their on-premise cluster to their off-premise cluster or for special projects, they’re just running standalone– standard load clusters in the Cloud.

insideHPC: Well thanks Jeff. Well, over to you Gabor. What is going on with SC15? What are you showcasing here with LSF in general?

Gabor Samu: We put together very interesting demo for the show. It’s demo to highlight the complete HPC workload management capabilities of Platform LSF. So we have genomic pipeline which is the workload that we’re running. The Spectrum Scale which is managing the storage and it’s running all in a Hybrid Cloud environment with IBM power systems as well as x86 systems.

So here really what we want to emphasize is the fact that with IBM Platform LSF family, you have additional capabilities such as application portal and workflow tool for managing computational workflows. And those allow you to basically build and manage workflows and to submit them, and run them without having to use the CLI.

So it’s not just about making HPC available, it’s about making it accessible to your users. And on top of that, last but not the least is Data. We have the Data Manager add-on for LSF which is being used to manage the data, to make sure that the data gets to the right place at the right time.

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